Manthorpe: Arab Spring awakens Kurdish dreams of autonomy

Jonathan Manthorpe

An unintended though predictable consequence of the Arab Spring is what can be called The Kurdish Awakening.

The 25 million Kurds, who live mostly in the mountainous terrain where Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran meet and who have been persecuted by those governments throughout history, are the world’s largest ethnic group without a country of their own.

But for nationalist Kurds the chaos and confusion spawned by the uprisings across the Arab Middle East in the last 18 months have presented an opportunity to advance their passion for an independent or autonomous Kurdistan.

That prospect is especially tantalizing in Syria where the besieged regime of President Bashar Assad has, to all intents, ceded local power to the Kurds in their heartland in the northeast of the country.

In an attempt to ensure that the Kurds remain on the sidelines as the Assad regime fights for its life against rebels on the streets of Syria’s largest city and commercial hub, Aleppo, the Damascus government has in recent weeks handed over most government institutions in the northeast to Kurdish activists.

This creation of a de facto autonomous Kurdish region together with the agreement last month of Syria’s traditionally factious and fractious three million Kurds to put aside their differences and form the Kurdish National Council has alarmed neighbouring Turkey.

About 15 million Kurds live in Turkey where the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK, has been fighting for recognition for 30 years. About 40,000 people have died in the fighting.

The Ankara government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is troubled by the emergence of the self-governing Kurdish enclave just over Turkey’s border in northeastern Syria.

That anxiety is heightened by the increasing dominance among Syrian Kurds of the militant Democratic Union Party, or PYD, which is closely allied to the Turkish Kurds’ PKK.

Erdogan is a strong supporter of the rebels in Syria and his country is being used both as a supply route for the increasingly effective fighters of the Free Syrian Army as well as a refuge for the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict.

But the last thing he wants is the revolution in Syria to produce an autonomous Kurdish state on Turkey’s border offering a haven to the PKK.

On Wednesday as Turkish soldiers and tanks staged exercises in the border region Erdogan told a local television station a Kurdish state in northern Syria would probably become a “terrorist entity.”

Turkish forces, he said, would not hesitate to hit PKK havens in Syria as they have done in Iraq.

The Kurds of northern Iraq, led by a key figure in this whole equation, Massoud Barzani, have had effective independence since the early 1990s.

It was then, with United Nations backing, that the United States and allied air forces imposed a no-fly zone over northern Iraq to prevent the then leader, Saddam Hussein, from slaughtering thousands among the country’s 5.5 million Kurds as he had done in the 1980s.

The removal of Saddam and creation by the Americans of a federal government in Iraq has allowed the flowering of a Kurdistan in the north that is not only largely autonomous, but oil rich.

Its leader Barzani has therefore not only the influence of power, but also of money.

Indeed, it was Barzani who last month persuaded the quarrelsome Syrian Kurdish factions to unite for their common good.

Barzani is a cunning politician and master of subtle and nuanced diplomacy.

He allows, for example, the Turkish Kurds’ PKK to maintain bases within his domain.

But these bases are in isolated areas of the mountainous region. So when the Turkish air force attacks them, as it frequently does, there is little likelihood of casualties among the local Kurds and Barzani need not complain forcefully to Ankara.

Barzani’s central role in the drama was clearly demonstrated on Wednesday.

As Erdogan was fulminating on television about attacking future PKK havens in Syria, his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, was visiting Barzani in the Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil.

Barzani gave Davutoglu what he wanted and agreed that “any attempt to exploit the power vacuum [in Syria] by any violent group or organization will be considered a common threat, which should be jointly addressed.”

Then Davutoglu made a gesture designed to cement the relationship between Ankara and the Kurdish leader.

The Turkish foreign minister made an unannounced and unauthorized visit to the oil city of Kirkuk, whose incorporation in the Kurdish region is opposed by the central government in Baghdad.

The Baghdad government is outraged at this interference by Ankara in internal Iraqi affairs.

But for Erdogan the only internal affair that counts is managing the implications for Turkey of Kurdish aspirations for autonomy.

A good place to start, of course, would be for the Erdogan government to address the grievances of Turkish Kurds, including mother-tongue education, proportional political representation and a degree of devolved administrative powers.

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